I like to cook… but nobody said I’m good. For that reason I found Cooking Capsules one of the most intriguing applications on the Android Market. With a few taps of the touchscreen you can select a delicious recipe, view a picture of the final product, see a checkable/editable list of ingredients and a list of directions/steps, and watch a video illustrating each step of the recipe.
In Baltimore, T-Mobile has a 3G network but unfortunately I expiremented closer to Washington DC and didn’t use WiFi or 3G which caused incredibly lags for the videos… which as you’ll see I REALLY needed.
My biggest problem throughout the use of cooking capsules was the inability to watch streaming video with any consistency… and unfortunately that was my fault. Sitting on the couch later, connected to WiFi, they were playing perfectly and I was banging my head against the… couch. So at least that didn’t hurt.
But I did find some things that I think/know could use improving with cooking capsules.
Selection. There are only 8 recipes to start… I understand the phone isn’t even out yet and hopefully this will be remedied but if they can build a nice big library of recipes, this could become a “goto app” for many, many people.
Servings. I love the fact that when you change the number of servings, the ingredients are updated. Unfortunately, ingredients are also mentioned in the cooking instructions but THESE amounts aren’t updated in conjunction with servings… at least with the recipe we tried. This made everything kind of confusing.
Pictures/Video Ordering. Being able to watch the video is ESSENTIAL but most people probably don’t want to watch the entire thing. They’ll want to see what the finished product looks like and when going through the directions, refer to the video when they don’t fully understand and need a little help. It would do everyone a lot of good if you could click on a link in the step to take you DIRECTLY to the part of the video for that step of directions.
Shopping Lists. Hopefully a main “shopping list” on Android will surface where applications such as Cooking Capsules will allow you to drop the items into an overall list. What if I was making 2 recipes? Or also going to Wal-Mart? It would be irritating to have to open up my Cooking Capsules Shopping over and over… aggregating to one big list would be a great idea… although probably out of their hands.
Something fun you wouldn’t know from watching the video above is that the stove caught on fire during this film. Somehow the pot with steamed brocolli had something flammable on it and I turned around and FLAMES EVERYWHERE. Little flames but still… flames. Don’t worry, no G1s were hurt in the filming of this video.
I’m already eager to try this application out again… with WiFi and/or 3G connection… otherwise it just ain’t worth it. But that is to be expected.